Magenta Ray is Lisa Hart and Mark Larson, a couple and creative partnership a decade deep, and “A Kiss Like This” was written during COVID lockdown, a period the pair describe as genuinely blissful even while the world around them wasn’t. The song captures the anticipation of a first kiss, that moment two people realize they’ve found something real and there’s no turning back, and it draws on a shared reference pool that includes Garbage, Portishead, Massive Attack and PJ Harvey, mixing driving alt-rock with darker, atmospheric electronic layers.
The defining musical idea here is Mark’s guitar work, built on fast-panning tremolo and an unconventional chord progression meant to create a spinning, vertigo-like sensation that mirrors the disorientation of falling for someone. I thought it was a legitimately genius piece of sound design. I mean, using a physical, almost dizzying guitar effect to represent an emotional state is such a perfect way to capitalize on how malleable guitars are. That texture sits beneath Lisa’s vocals, which carry the edge and dynamic range that the band’s reference points would suggest, while dark, surging synths fill the rest of the space around her.
The pair recorded the track in a home studio Mark’s family hand-built themselves, tucked into Napa Valley but built to feel like a cabin in Tahoe, and that sense of a private, unhurried creative space comes through in a song that never feels rushed toward its own hooks. Lisa, who’s worked as a healer since she was 21, writes lyrics she describes as genuinely medicinal for her, part of a broader mission the band sums up as bringing the darkness into the light, taking shadow moments and turning them into something warmer.
With local shows already behind them at venues like The Blue Note Napa and more dates on the way this fall, “A Kiss Like This” reads as a confident opening statement for a duo that’s clearly spent years finding their sound together before ever putting a record out.
